I haven’t been in the mood to swim or lift weights lately, so I’ve been walking to make sure I get enough exercise.<\/p>\n
I came across an interesting site in my fits of nerdliness and compulsive Internet research (hey, I have an excuse.\u00a0 It’s my job).\u00a0 It’s called Walkscore<\/a> and it’s supposed to be a rating of how “walkable” your house is.\u00a0 The basic principles of it are that you plug in your home or work address and find out how many amenities you can get to from your house.<\/p>\n My own address has a score of 68.\u00a0 It’s moderately walkable.\u00a0 The house I grew up has a score of 38.\u00a0\u00a0 You’re pretty much car-dependent.\u00a0 (True!).\u00a0 I checked out a couple of addresses where I’ve lived as an adult.\u00a0 I used to live on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg, VA.\u00a0 That has a high walkable score indeed — 86.\u00a0 (The best you can get is 100).\u00a0 I remember really enjoying being able to go out of my front door and walk just anywhere.\u00a0 If I ever moved back to Freddy’s Patch, I would do my best to live in town if I could possibly manage it, even considering the atrocious parking.\u00a0 Being able to walk to the train station and take the VRE into Washington DC for the day was always really nice.<\/p>\n But lots of people don’t live places where walking to do errands is even reasonable.\u00a0 I mean, I could eschew a car and do all my grocery shopping at the little town grocery store.\u00a0 In fact, this month, just to force myself to walk more, I’m doing the French thing and going grocery shopping every day and walking.<\/p>\n